In general commercially available off the shelf computers, tablets and mobile phones have increasingly less input and output (I/O) capability aside from wireless. Increasingly parallel printer ports, serial ports, mini-card slots (such as SD, SD-micro), and bus or I/O card slots have been eliminated with the exception of USB (Universal Serial Bus) and HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface). The USB available on many hand held computers and smart phones does not provide host capability.
Despite the fact that mobile phones and tablet computers have become multiprocessor platforms well suited to be real-time monitoring and control devices individually or in a larger system with real-time constraints these devices have been increasingly limited by limited input and output.
In particular it is more difficult to use a tablet computer or mobile phone in a monitoring and control system as was done prior with computers such as the desktop personal computer which had bus slots (such as the ISA, VESA, PCI to name a few) or parallel ports which could be used for input and output found on the earliest desktop units. VME was also widely used as a bus wherein I/O could be customized in various combinations of discrete inputs and outputs and analog inputs and outputs via cards. Other customized cards for motion control (motor control), robotics and many other applications existed.
In view of these disadvantages, it is the object of this invention to make new increasingly restricted tablet computers and mobile phones more general purpose by this converter as an angled surface, enclosure, slot, rack, sleeve, clear material which uses the tablet computer or mobile phone's existing human interface (touchscreen) and software (EG MP4 player application, PNG image viewer application) and customized software to provide input and output (I/O) to the tablet computer or mobile phone used in the same manner as older PCI bus cards or VME bus cards to provide digital and analog I/O.